Unfortunately, though Jones manages to give me credit for discovering the literary fraudulence of “Travels With Charley,” he screws up my politics.

Jones doesn’t know what a libertarian is, obviously, or he wouldn’t have said that libertarianism is the same as being stridently Republican.

Go to the Spectator to read the review, which is of the typical lefty variety. Or just stay here and read my comment, which gave me the opportunity to plug my book to the good people of the UK.

Steinbeck (with wife Elaine) as he really looked a month after completing his “Charley” trip — not as he is pictured in the Spectator.

Thanks much to Lewis Jones for mentioning me, my book ‘Dogging Steinbeck’ and my role in exposing the fictions and fibs in Steinbeck’s iconic work of non-nonfiction, ‘Travels With Charley’.

As my new friend Geert Mak knows, for 50 years ‘Travels’ was marketed, reviewed and taught as work of nonfiction — until I came along, did some basic snooping in libraries and on the road, got lucky, proved it was mostly made up and occasionally outright deceptive and declared it a ‘literary fraud’.

(Not that I haven’t said it somewhere in a blog or interview, but the phrase ‘a very flawed load of fictional crap and deception’ does not appear in my book, which, while full of jokes, void of footnotes and liberally sprinkled with my libertarian politics, is a serious work of journalism that has changed the way ‘Travels’ will be read forever. Anyone interested in learning more is urged to buy my ‘literary expose’ at Amazon.com.UK or go to www.truthaboutcharley.com).

I especially urge Mr. Lewis to read my book — or at least skim it — before jumping to any more conclusions or launching any more of his ‘surmises’ (i.e., wild and uninformed guesses) about my politics, my affection for the Republican Party or my adherence to Fox News’ historical interpretations.

He’d find evidence in ‘Dogging Steinbeck’ that I dislike (i.e., hate) both major parties for their bipartisan plundering and wrecking of our land, which is still great in spite of them:

“It was Nov. 2 – Election Day. The historic date the Tea Party was going
to seize America from the Democrats and give it back to the Republicans,
the party that had taken us to a foolish war in Iraq, copiloted the
economy into a mountainside and squandered federal money it didn’t have
like drunken Democrats.”

And the morning after the election, I write:

“Overnight America supposedly underwent a historic political change. Republican Tea Partiers had seized the U.S. House and a new Golden Age of limited government, lower taxes and personal freedom was allegedly on the way. It was the usual hype and hysteria. Nothing would be changing on the U.S.S. Big Government except a few deck chairs.”

Based on his review, I surmise Lewis won’t like my politics. Nor will he appreciate what I say about the political biases and cultural snobbery of liberal New Yorkers like Steinbeck (that’s what he was in 1960) who’ve made it a habit to sneer at the politics, culture and values of the Americans they encounter in Flyover Country when they dare to travel by car between Manhattan and the Hollywood Sign.

When Lewis wrote that I take “an ‘openly libertarian’ (i.e. stridently Republican) line against the Democrat Steinbeck” he demonstrated that he has absolutely no idea what a libertarian is. (A primer: it’s someone who favors, stridently, maximum individual freedom, a weak and limited state, a system of free market — not crony — capitalism and a non-interventionist foreign policy; Brits should think John Stuart Mill, Manchester Liberalism, Bright & Cobden, Lord Acton, Hayek, etc.).

Libertarians — especially this one — wouldn’t be caught dead being ‘stridently Republican’. And while Fox News does have good libertarians like John Stossel and Andrew Napolitano, its prime-time all-stars — O’Reilly, Kelly and Hannity — are awful conservatives and/or partisan Republicans.

The America I found along the Old Steinbeck Highway in 2010 was opposite from the gloomy one my esteemed Euro-socialist colleague Mak found. I described 11,276 miles of it as well as I could, as a veteran newspaper journalist, albeit through libertarian eyes, not socialist ones.

Where Mak saw islands of prosperity in a sea of poverty and anguish, I saw the opposite. Where Mak saw the failure of the federal government to make things right in the hinterland and cities, I saw evidence of the federal government’s century-old habit of doing things wrong. Etc. Etc. From a libertarian, not Republican, point of view.

Same country, same roads, same time; two people, two very different sets of opinions and conclusions. Steinbeck knew it would work that way and said in ‘Travels’ that the country he found would not be the same one others coming behind him would find 10 minutes later. He wasn’t lying about that, at least.

For the record: The missing Washington Post woman was/is Rachel Dry, who wrote a nice piece about her pursuit of Steinbeck’s ghost and her accidental encounter with me. http://www.washingtonpost.com/… And your photo of Steinbeck is not what he looked like in 1960, but more like 20 years earlier.

Finally, I stridently apologize to all proper Brits who might be offended by my use of the slang term ‘dogging’ in my title. I had no idea.

About 54 years ago today, John Steinbeck finished his failed “Travels With Charley” road trip and dragged his tired and unhappy ass back home to New York City.

He had driven Rocinante about 10,000 miles in the fall of 1960 and spent the next 10 months, off and on, writing “Charley.” As we now know, and as I put into “Dogging Steinbeck,” he had to make up a lot of stuff to fill his slim travel book — which was, quite deviously, edited and marketed as a true nonfiction account of his search for the America he had lost touch with.

When I followed Steinbeck’s trail faithfully in the fall of 2010, I didn’t know it but I was a few days ahead of famed Dutch historian/journalist Geert Mak. I only found out in 2012 that Mak too had had the idea of retracing Steinbeck’s journey as a way to compare the changes that have beset/improved America in the last 50 years.

Mak is a self-defined Euro-socialist. Therefore his view of the USA is more pessimistic than mine, which is libertarianly tilted and critical of the current media and the snooty liberal East Coast view of Flyover Country that Steinbeck also held.

The cultural life of America – film, music, literature – so important in founding and reasserting a national identity, is almost totally ignored by the author

Geert Mak’s retracing of John Steinbeck’s celebrated American journey, Travels with Charley, first appeared in the Netherlands in 2012 under the title Travels Without John: In Search of America.

In this fluid English translation by Liz Waters, the title has been transposed and refocused to In America: Travels with John Steinbeck. In purely commercial terms, one can see why the publisher would want to amplify the Steinbeck link, make him a part of the action. Yet this is a disparity that points to the problem at the heart of this book: it doesn’t quite know exactly what it wants to be.

Steinbeck, at least at first, had a clear idea of both what he was writing, and why he was writing it. In 1960, after an illness had forced him to take stock, he set off from Sag Harbour – with his dog, Charley – journeying through 33 of the 50 American states, to find the country he loved. It’s the last of Steinbeck’s major works, and one that begins in hope and macho endeavour, and ends in downbeat disappointment. It’s a journey riven with great writing, moments of drama and self-reflection; it is also hugely fictionalised, and most probably more imagination than fact.

My pal Michael Challik, the great veteran “shooter” at KDKA TV and a born Dutchman, did me a great favor the other day by translating part of a video interview with Steinbeck-chaser Geert Mak.

Mak, a famous and renowned Dutch journalist/historian/author, also retraced Steinbeck’s “Charley” route in the fall of 2010 and wrote a big fat, footnoted book that became a best-seller in Holland. Mak’s book, “Travels Without John in Search of America,” is being translated into English. Mak kindly mentions me about a dozen times, favorably.

And here’s the translation of the 5-minute video, courtesy of the kind Michael Challik:

Geert Mak is lying awake thinking of the competition.

You think you have designed a great plan, but one afternoon in a little town, Lancaster, we were looking for a place John Steinbeck had stayed. The night, a motel, pouring down rain, got out at a gas station, asked where is the motel from the 1960’s. I can still see him, a hat on turned backwards, “Oh Steinbeck! Right?”

(The service station attendant continues.) “Yesterday, there was also somebody here.” So you think you’re the only one. Real quickly Googled, wondering who that could be, and got the answer in about three minutes. Bill Steigerwald, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, retired journalist. Did exactly the same, except took off half-an-hour sooner. We left at at 8:30…he left at 8, so we just missed him on the ferry to the mainland.

Bill wrote in his blog on the ferry at 8:45 where he met a third journalist, a guy called John Woesdijk (sp?), who was walking the route with a dog for a dog magazine. Later we found out that there was a fourth. She was with the Washington Post with her Mum. The last two I didn’t hear anything from again. All four wanted to follow Steinbeck’s route, but Bill S., I must be honest, tried to follow Steinbeck’s whole route. I must say I couldn’t agree with his political views, to say the least, but he did describe the route very precisely, like where Steinbeck bought his gun, with all kinds of movies, including if you would like to follow the route through his eyes. I really recommend his website.

QUESTION: You didn’t have any contact with him?

ANSWER: Oh yeah, later on we talked a lot about it. I really did want to talk to him because I really did find – even though he had opinions on Obama, etc. – he was very dedicated, and he did it by himself, and he was the only one who was roughing it, because Steinbeck stayed in hotels mostly. Bill really roughed it out. I got a lot of respect for him, but I thought the only thing I can do is to use him in my book…and so it goes.

But as soon as my book was finished, I wrote him – and he had also heard of me. He heard about a book in Holland, and we talked openly and frequently, and we are planning in our lives absolutely to come together, and with a great glass of beer and talk about world problems and solve them by the end of the afternoon.

QUESTION: He is an arch-conservative, right-winger Republican?

ANSWER: No, no! He would get real mad if you tell him that, because he really didn’t like George W. Bush. He is a Libertarian thinker. No, No I am a half-Socialistic, latte drinking, French loving, Volvo driving, European.

So I was really different, but Steigerwald found out that Steinbeck said things in his book that were absolutely not true, and I also discovered that too. Because if you follow Steinbeck’s journey you find, for instance, he went fishing a whole afternoon with a companion, and talks about his marriage etc., but supposedly on the same day when you follow his iterinerary he drove 400-450 miles. You can’t be fishing in the beginning of the afternoon – and then drive 450-miles. So you find a lot of discrepancies.

On Sept. 29, 1960, John Steinbeck slept in camper under a bridge in the rain somewhere along Maine’s Route 11, which probably has more moose living along it than people.

We know Steinbeck actually did sleep in his truck that night, because he told his wife Elaine he did in a letter to her from the road the next night.

Steinbeck’s lonely night may have been the only time on his 75 day trip he slept in his camper in the middle of nowhere. Most of the time he was in a motel or shacked up with his wife in a fancy hotel, resort or family vacation home.

Three falls ago, exactly 50 years after John Steinbeck took his “Travels With Charley” trip, I chased Steinbeck’s ghost around the USA.

Here’s an excerpt from my book that recounts what I did when he drove down motel-less Route 11 — and where I had to sleep.

Destination Milo

The Aroostook County line finally appeared, but Route 11 refused to end. I watched a protracted sunset from a hilltop and small-talked to two overly serious photographers from Montreal who had set up their tripods in the tall grass to capture the glorious panorama.

The middle of Maine feels even emptier when the sun is gone. It was dark when I pulled into Millinocket, the lumber mill town where the Pelletier family of “American Loggers” fame lived. After a surprisingly good spinach salad and a beer at Pelletier’s crowded family restaurant/bar, I drove into the black night for the next major town, Milo. In the dark I covered a distance of 39 miles to Milo, but the road I traveled could have been a high-speed treadmill in a tunnel. As far I could tell, except for Brownville Junction, it was deep forest all the way. I took photos of the twisting road ahead as I chased its white lines at 60 mph, straddling the centerline through a narrow channel of trees.

A few mailboxes flashed by, a house with no lights, maybe a river. My Sirius XM radio, cranked up extra-loud with jazz, cut in and out because of the terrain or overhanging trees, I didn’t know which. I met my third car after 17 miles. In 45 minutes I counted 12. Steinbeck, who slept overnight in his camper shell by a bridge somewhere along Route 11, traveled the same lonely desolate way, but probably in daylight, when the local moose population would have been awake. Maine has 30,000 moose but I didn’t run into one.

I passed through downtown Milo, a town of 2,400 in the dead center of Maine. Once a thriving railroad repair facility for all of New England, Milo earned its Wiki-immortality in 1923 when 75 members of the Ku Klux Klan sullied the town’s Labor Day parade by holding its first daylight march in the United States. South of town I stopped for gas at the C&J Variety store. A true variety store, it carried booze, paperback books, pizza, live bait and Milo hoodies. Out front it even had a public pay phone, something Steinbeck would have appreciated if C&J Variety hadn’t been a Studebaker dealership or whatever it was in 1960.

“Did you ever hear of John Steinbeck?” I asked the 20-something girl behind the counter when she came outside for a smoke.

“I don’t think he lives around here,” she said.

Too tired to laugh, I held my smart-ass tongue. I provided her with some context.

“He’s the author of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and ‘Of Mice and Men.’ Did you ever have to read them in high school?”

Her face brightened. “Now that you say it, I’ve heard the name. I thought you were asking me if he lived around here.” She wasn’t the last person, young and old, who would not recognize John Steinbeck’s name until I also mentioned his two most famous books, which most high school kids in America still read – or at least are still assigned.

I’ll never know how close I was to a motel when I gave up. I drove another 70 or 80 miles south of Milo, trusting my GPS Person to figure out the best way to get from endless state Route 11 to U.S. Highway 2. My notebook from that night faded into scribbles and went blank. “Dover has a McDonald’s …. Guilford, no business district….” For an hour I looked for a decent turnout or rest stop. On a long grade on U.S. Route 2, somewhere east of Farmington, Maine, I flew past a poorly lighted used car dealership sitting by itself. I hit the brakes hard, backed onto the grassy lot and parked at the end of a row of vehicles. With the nose of my RAV4 pointed at the road, I locked myself in, cracked my sunroof, installed my blackout curtains and instantly fell asleep.

Impersonating a used car worked flawlessly. Even with its cargo carrier, my RAV4 blended in with the 30 or 40 other vehicles parked on the lot. Trucks and cars and the local law hurrying by in the night took no notice. Here is an extremely over-exposed photo I took of my car in the used car lot.

Up at 4:50, by 5:15 I was in the Farmington McDonald’s sipping coffee, reading my email, writing a blog item and eavesdropping on four Republican geezers saying kind things about Sarah Palin that would offend and frighten most of my ex-colleagues in journalism.

It was there that I discovered two reliable things about McDonald’s that benefitted me for the next 10,000 miles: You can count on every McDonald’s to have strong, free Wi-Fi that you can use for as long as you want any time of day. And you can count on finding a local gang of 4 to 6 wise old guys in bad hats who will be thrilled to answer a stranger’s questions about what their world was like in 1960.

On Sept. 23, 1960, John Steinbeck and his faithful French-born poodle Charley left Sag Harbor, N.Y., and began the road trip that would become “Travels With Charley in Search of America,” one of the best-selling nonfiction books of 1962.

As I discovered in 2010, Steinbeck’s beloved, iconic road book, which turned 50 on July 27, is not a work of nonfiction. It is a highly fictionalized and dishonest account of his actual trip, who he traveled with and what he really thought about the America he found.

On Sept. 25 Penguin Group will release a 50th anniversary edition of the book, which it describes on its web site as:

“At age fifty-eight, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America. This chronicle of their trip meanders from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Still evocative and awe-inspiring after fifty years, Travels with Charley in Search of America provides an intimate look at one of America’s most beloved writers in the later years of his life—a self-portrait of a man who never wrote an explicit autobiography. Written during a time of upheaval and racial tension in the South—which Steinbeck witnessed firsthand—Travels with Charley is a stunning evocation of America on the eve of a tumultuous decade.”

Considering the true nature of Steinbeck’s trip, that’s a disingenuous and overly generous description of a multi-flawed book that never deserved its nonfiction designation and has been outed as a 50-year-old literary fraud.

In an email a few weeks ago I asked if the Penguin Group had “an official response to my discovery that ‘Charley,’ though marketed and reviewed and taught as a nonfiction account of Steinbeck’s 1960 trip, is heavily fictionalized?”

The company’s PR department in New York declined to comment.

Penguin, which for obvious reasons is not interested in helping me find more smoking guns, also told me that the company does not have Vikings’ old “Travels With Charley” files “on site” and that they are probably with Steinbeck’s estate. Perhaps future scholars will want to study them.

Meanwhile, if you can read Dutch, you can order Geert Mak’s new book “Traveling Without John in Search of America.” Mak, a well-known journalist and author in the Netherlands, did what I did and carefully repeated Steinbeck’s trip in the fall of 2010.

Mak did a lot of the same research I did and his nearly 600-page book includes much of what I discovered about Steinbeck’s real trip and how Steinbeck’s original manuscript was edited to hide the fact that he traveled in luxury and did not travel alone.

Here, translated by Google’s clever but imperfect computers, is how the book is described on Mak’s web site:

Travelling without John

Looking for America

On September 23, 1960 left the legendary writer John Steinbeck and his poodle Charley for an expedition across the American continent. He wanted his country and his countrymen again know. Exactly fifty years later, on the hour, was Geert Mak again for the old house of Steinbeck. It was the beginning of a renewed inspection tour in the footsteps of Charley and John, but now with the eyes of 2010. What is the past half century in American cities and towns changed? Where is Main Street USA go?

Which dreams chased the Americans over the centuries their ideals? What is it ended? What remains of that “city on the hill”, the Promised Land which was once the world looked? And above all, what we have together, America and Europe in the 21st century?

Geert Mak avoided, like John Steinbeck, the beaten path. He drove thousands of miles through the potato fields of Maine and the infinity of the Midwest, sat day after day at the table with farmers, laborers, fishermen and schoolmasters, met with shiny suburbs and boarded-up village shops, searched, again and again, to the stories of this country which nobody ever gets finished.

Buy “Dogging Steinbeck”

First Bill Steigerwald took John Steinbeck's classic "Travels With Charley" and used it as a map for his own cross-country road trip in search of America. Then he proved Steinbeck's iconic nonfiction book was a 50-year-old literary fraud. A true story about the triumph of truth.

“Travels Without Charley”

In "Travels Without Charley," Bill Steigerwald's road blog from the fall of 2010, he detailed how he discovered John Steinbeck’s 1962 nonfiction classic "Travels With Charley" is not a true and honest account of the cross-country trip he made in the fall of 1960. The daily account of Steigerwald's 11,276-mile trip, which first appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, starts in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

True Discoveries

I discovered two important truths when I set out to follow John Steinbeck’s "Travels With Charley" route in the fall of 2010. I found out Steinbeck’s iconic nonfiction book was a 50-year-old literary fraud. And I found out that despite the Great Recession and national headlines dripping with gloom and doom, America is still a big, empty, rich, safe, clean, prosperous and friendly country. This site explains how I stumbled onto Steinbeck’s deceit and includes the daily account of my 11,276-mile drive from Long Island to Maine to California and back. Meanwhile, I’ve turned my adventures with John Steinbeck and his famous work into an Amazon.com book of my own, "Dogging Steinbeck." A nonfiction one.E-mail Bill Steigerwald

Related Steinbeck Links

The National Steinbeck Center is the most accessible place to enter the fictional and nonfictional world of John Steinbeck, who was 58 when he set off in search of America. Located in Salinas, Calif., Steinbeck's birthplace, the center offers multimedia exhibits and the star Steinbeck relic, Rocinante, the restored truck-camper used for "Travels With Charley," the top-selling book in the museum store. The center's archivist will take your questions at the center's Facebook page.